Hygiene

Hygiene is crucial in preventing disease. Together with clean water and decent sanitation it can transform people’s health, education and livelihoods.

WaterAid/Tom Greenwood

Despite significant progress, diarrhoeal diseases caused by dirty water, inadequate sanitation and hygiene continue to kill a child under five every two minutes. This should not be normal.

WaterAid and hygiene

Poor hygiene means children are regularly ill and miss school, adults are not able to work to support their families, patients are at risk in healthcare environments, and people’s dignity is compromised. By changing their hygiene behaviours, people can keep themselves and their environment clean; stay healthy and stop diseases spreading; and live dignified lives.

However, hygiene remains one of the least prioritised areas of development. While it is, in theory, an integrated part of global water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) work, in reality this is often not the case. Research shows that improving hygiene practices is often an afterthought, and standalone hygiene intervention programmes are rare, even where water and sanitation services have been put in place.

While water and sanitation infrastructure provides the physical conditions for hygiene, good hygiene behaviours are crucial in preventing disease and successfully treating existing medical conditions. Without hygiene, the benefits of clean water and decent toilets will always be limited.

Handwashing with soap: why should we care?

What role should handwashing play in the global development agenda and why should we care about handwashing with soap? Om Gautam Prasad explains.

Our approach

At WaterAid, we include hygiene in everything we do. Only with clean water, adequate sanitation and good hygiene can people change their lives for good.

In addition to promoting and supporting the delivery of handwashing facilities in people’s homes, schools, health centres and other community spaces, we change hygiene behaviour. We know from our own experience and that of others that simply sharing knowledge of good hygiene practices rarely results in sustained behaviour change. So instead, based on evidence of what does work, we find new, creative ways to motivate people by understanding and appealing to what they care about, taking into account the norms and values they share with their wider community.

Key hygiene behaviours we focus on include:

handwashing with soap at critical moments

managing water safely, from its source to its consumption

hygienic use of sanitation facilities so that human excreta is dealt with safely (including children’s faeces)

food hygiene

menstrual hygiene

other context-specific behaviours, such as face washing and waste management.

We monitor and evaluate our work to learn from it, and share this learning to make a bigger difference. We support and encourage governments and service providers to integrate hygiene promotion into their policies and programmes and resource it adequately. Having the skills and resources to run hygiene programmes effectively is essential. One of the major challenges in getting governments and service providers to prioritise hygiene, is the lack of understanding of how it links with health, social and economic outcomes.

We raise awareness of the importance of good hygiene and motivate others through partnerships in WASH, education, food and nutrition, and health – especially maternal and child health and trachoma. And we collaborate with ministries and agencies responsible for women’s issues, young people and the environment, including the private sector and academia.

We design engaging, attractive and motivational hygiene behaviour change intervention packages based on evidences and implement it using novel approaches to create sustained behaviour change.

We won’t stop until good hygiene behaviour and facilities are normal for everyone, everywhere.